I have been a scientist in the field of the earth and environmental sciences for 33 years, specializing in geologic disposal of nuclear waste, energy-related research, subsurface transport and environmental clean-up of heavy metals. I consult on strategic planning for the DOE, EPA/State environmental agencies, and industry including companies that own nuclear, hydro, wind farms, large solar arrays, coal and gas plants. I also consult for EPA/State environmental agencies and industry on clean-up of heavy metals from soil and water. For over 20 years I have been a member of Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the NRDC, the Environmental Defense Fund and many others, as well as professional societies including the America Nuclear Society, the American Chemical Society and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.

The Fracking Solution Is A Good Cement Job

It‘s not that drilling for oil and gas is bad. It’s not that drilling has to result in environmental destruction. It’s just that sometimes it turns out that way because a few key people are greedy or just plain lazy, from the management down to the field workers. But I say it’s all up to the cement job.

Cementing fills and seals the annulus between the well casing and the drilled hole. It isolates and segregates different subsurface zones and rock units, it controls corrosion, and it stabilizes the well, the pipe and the rock formation itself.

Cement forms an extremely strong, effectively impermeable, seal from a thin slurry that can be pumped pretty easily anywhere, and is the ideal material for this purpose (Cementing). True understanding of cement came from the oil industry over the last hundred-plus years and without cement, there would be no drilling.

Cementing is an essential activity in drilling a well, usually coming at the end of operations and at the time that everything is wrapping up and everyone’s wanting to move on to the next well. As such, it’s sometimes botched. A lot more time and money is then spent fixing it, or worse, recovering from a horrible aftermath.

We know these cementing materials very well. We can deal with an amazing number of conditions and weird circumstances. When we want to. When we mess up, we think we can always do a squeeze job to repair, redirect, seal or otherwise fix the job afterwards. But this is familiar stuff, and should not fail if done appropriately.

But cementing is not easy and it takes some time and some money. Not much compared to the drilling itself or to the value of the oil or gas obtained, but still significant. And for that reason, the cement job is susceptible to the same boneheaded decisions that are made to save a buck but end up losing billions.

This is an ideal situation for strong regulations. Unfortunately, the cement job is not regulated, not even the cement composition. Sure, drillers are urged to follow guidelines of the main industry trade group who certainly knows this better than anyone else. But self-regulation has never been a good idea. Bridges and roads have quite strong federal controls on the use of cement and making concrete. Why can’t the oil and gas industry? It won’t cost that much and it really would remove the majority of the risks.

A case-in-point is the recent BPBP Deep Water Horizon blow-out (NAE Report). While many remember the failed blow-out preventer and bad judgement all-around, a sloppy cement job in the Macondo Well, meant to save a couple of days and a few hundred thousand dollars, failed. This allowed natural gas to migrate up the hole and explode at the surface. Together with other causes, this debacle will eventually cost over $100 billion, and has contaminated a huge swath of ocean and Gulf coastline, and killed eleven people.

For what? To save a few days and a few hundred thousand dollars? To quickly wrap up and get out of there? Thinking they could do a squeeze job later if the cement job failed? Cementing is the way you finish this up, or save it for later drilling as was the case for the Macondo. And $100 billion would pay for guaranteed good cement jobs on over a million wells (Bad Cement Jobs).

Which brings us to gas fracking. Hydraulic fracturing pumps many thousands of gallons of mainly water and sand, with a few chemicals, at high pressure into tight gas-bearing shale deposits (hardened muds), creating cracks that allow gas to flow back up the well to the surface (Shale Shock). The sand gets stuck in the cracks and keeps them open.

But if the well is not cemented properly, the gas leaks out into the other units, particularly drinking water aquifers, as it comes back up the well. Lots of outrage has been directed towards the fracking itself, but the worse culprit is a bad cement job (Faulty Wells, Not Fracking). Almost all of the TV spots, heart-breaking stories of homeowners, and burning faucets are actually from bad cement jobs, not the fracking.

There are disputes over how many wells have bad cement jobs. Scott Anderson, of the Environmental Defense Fund, says up to 15% of cement jobs are bad, whereas Ray Walker of the drilling industry quarrels with that number, thinking it’s less than 1% (Fight Over Fracking). In fact, the problem is getting so visible that even Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon formed an anti-fracking group (Artists Against Fracking).

We can do this better. Not only better, but near-perfect. If, and only if, we insist on good, careful cement jobs. And the only way to insist is with regulations that have some teeth in them. Even the father of modern fracking, George Phydias Mitchell, thinks so (Chris Helman).

Because gas is starting to dominate our national energy mix, I’d say it’s worth the cost of getting the cement job right, right now.

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“Yes, just an analogy on time. “, yes, a poor one as I and this posted pointed out the exact same issue. I don’t think the epiphany has hit you, that this is not an issue of science, it is an issue of failure to regulate.

If I had a way to eliminate toxic chemical releases into the air and water and earth. It will have value, and my effort, as an American inventor will have impact and implicit reward…… That statement is accurate until 2005 when the Cheney loophole effectively eliminated the implicit value of that invention. Re-read this till the Epiphany hits you.

I’m inclined to agree with Liz. The entire reponses above seems to “gloss” over the huge problem she raises to begin with: 7% initial failures which is huge. Then Schlumberger documentation shows an additional 30% failures over 30 years. The problem lies in encouraging the industry. People are going to try and shove regulations through. That’s a given. So maintream media articles like this amount to little more than PR for the industry attempting to push dialogue farther toward public acceptance. I’ve come to expect that with Forbes. The Chinese anecdote, if remotely true, does not support the argument as much as indict it: You’re telling us we’ve been using the same technology for 2,000 years and now in the 21st century space age the most profitable industry can’t not come up with simple technologies to quickly and cost effectively GUARANTEE solutions putting all this public debate to bed? Was natgas even a factor in the Chinese example? Did it involve biogenic methane or any of the other potential poisenous chemicals? It’s a single sketchy historical anecdote intended to project a safety picture onto 10s of 1000s of wells that ALREADY FAIL AT AN INITIAL 7% RATE AND WE’VE HAD NEARLY A CENTURY TO GET RIGHT. “A good cement job” is a feeble attempt at a new meme to encourage the industry.

An extremely good article. Simple and straight to the point. Most people have the least respect towards the importance of cementing in drilling. A mind set change is important to ensure people understand that cement is the first barrier between the reservoir and the wellbore and subsequently, the surface.

I can tell you authoritatively that one of the main considerations of an oil and gas explorer/developer/producer is to do everything possible to maximize the success and effectiveness of the cement job. Without a good cement job, drilling the well becomes an uneconomic exercise — money thrown away. More regulation, I can assure you, will have no effect on the success or failure of cement jobs. It would, however, further increase the cost of exploration and development of oil and gas, and as a result, yield less of these fuels. One could just as effectively call for more regulation to end crime, famine, illness, or any other condition that is unwanted. The marketplace remains the only real answer. Poor decisions, designs and procedures are punished mercilessly by the real world, and no amount of regulation can make this better.

Yes, but there is an economically-acceptable rate of failure that still makes money but does harm. That’s the limbo where regs matter. If it was just about money, we wouldn’t need any regs. And there is plenty of cutting corners in the name of saving money. It also depends on when the cement job fails.

“Unintended consequences:” Radiation from Fukushima made it all the way across the Atlantic and into American cow’s milk…from an accident that industrialists told us would NEVER happen because of “6 sigma” risk. Thank goodness the radiation was shortlived…Bottom line is promises were made with precisely your same claim above theres an “economically-acceptable rate of failure.” A sound bite for industry convenience. In January an Italian earthquake occured that the USGS correlated with fracking. Killing 17 people. Wouldn’t make me so livid if we did not aready have sufficient green energies that do not take the outsized risks. The only way fossil fuels stay cheap enough any more is by cutting corners incessantly. And rules for natgas wildcatting today won’t prevent disasters anymore than rules prevented deaths in a refinery in Argentina or on the Deepwater Horizon in the gulf (STILL belching up waste onto the beaches). You advocate a ravenous, greedy industry that will cause more disasters and deaths. Fossil fuel companies have had over 100 years to get it right and keep screwing up over..and over..and over. Now, there screwups are happening with more frequency and more deaths over time. The stakes are going up and we now have cost effective alternatives. This is ALL about protecting interests because the alternatives are now ready.

Not true. The fossil fuel industry has had a free ride for a 100 years, with no serious regulatory control. The Deepwater Horizon spill was the result of no regulatory oversight from an agency manned by oil folks. You’re not going to do without fossil fuel so regulate the heck out of it and enforce it. Not perfect but much better than what we have now. Fukushima was also not regulated, and they ignored warnings we gave them for years. We knew that could happen and that they were not caring. It’s all about responsibility and who pays when they fail, either through greed or laziness. Yes, an economically-acceptable rate of failure is not acceptable.

Having worked in the offshore drilling industry for six years, this read was a bit of a struggle for me and could be seen as misleading to your readers. “Cementing is an essential activity in drilling a well, usually coming at the end of operations ” 3 or 4 sets of casing are run and more for deeper wells. The first wider casing is run and then cemented in. The cement goes between the outside of the casing and the well bore. The annulus. Then a few more hundred feet is drilled with a narrower drill bit and then the narrower casing is run and cemented in. This happens every several hundred feet or so until the target is reached. So this happens at the beginning of a well being drilled right through to total depth. When the well is no longer viable after the oil or gas is no longer coming to surface of it`s own accord, the well is plugged and abandoned. This is usually a mechanical plug with cement poured in on top. It matters not how good the cement job or the plug and cement for abandonment, both cement and casing will deteriorate over time and eventually fail. My biggest fear over this fracking lark is that after a well has been fracked several times, each frack job will have compromised the well`s integrity by the extreme high pumping pressures along with the associated pumped fluid vibrations. The brines in the formation and other corrosive elements will attack the casing steel. Just take a look at some of the plugged and abandoned wells around that have been left unchecked for the last twenty years. You will find them leaking. Around 40% of the wells in the Gulf are leaking. Now think about how many wells have been plugged and abandoned all over the world and if not leaking now, WILL be leaking at some point in the future. Now think about a typical frack job. One well pad could have between 5 and 20 wells. Each well could be fracked several times. One pad is needed for every 5 ish square miles with the shale play. Now think about how many MORE wells will be added to the mix, left to rot, leaking their deadly gasses and toxic slurries into the aquifers and the air. Once those frackers have left those wells, they are no longer their responsibility. WHO is going to take on the impossible and expensive task of monitoring these wells and then trying to seal them?? Where will the money come from?? Think about that. Once the aquifer is contaminated, THAT`S IT. You can`t drill down and clean it. Once those gasses are in the atmosphere, you can`t bring them back. CH4 is worse than CO2 at trapping heat in the shorter term. So although the farck job itself is very worrying, I`m more concerned about all those millions of plugged and abandoned wells that WILL be leaking 10-20-50 years from. The frackers and their investors will have made their money and long gone leaving you and I to deal with the fracking mess left behind. But back to my initial point. There are cement jobs during the drilling of a well and there are plugging/cementing and abandoning of wells at the end of production. Both are known to be done poorly and with low grade cement. The reason is that it matters not how good the cement, it will become porous and crack and crumble over time and the casing will rust. BAN FRACKING NOW.